While it largely fell out of the
public consciousness after the author’s death, Simms’s The Lily and the Totem is one of his most intriguing works, both
because of its overall quality and its experimentation with the possibilities
of mixing history and fiction. While The Lily and the Totem is a story of
French Huguenots in sixteenth-century Florida, it is not, importantly, a
historical romance. Rather, Simms here
experimented with a new way in which to relate history—by telling history
through fictionalized narratives that fill in the gaps between what we do and
do ...